After many years feeding I went to upgrade my version 6.2. As it seems with most of my projects, it mushroomed.
I’ve added a 2nd UAT specific dongle, a 978MHz antenna and coax, checked my PPM on both dongles, added a 2 channel LNA with narrow band-pass filters. Re-installed all the software on a new card with Bookworm installed. Running on a RPi 3B+. The previous install was from the my beginning in 2015 and I’m committed to getting better results, especially over a neighbor.
I think I’m close but my problem is when I install the 978 dongle, I get nothing on either channel.
I did serialize the dongles and followed all tutorials for post v6 I could find. Some commands appear to only be for piaware images.
The big question, finally; Is running from a PiAware image mandatory? If not suggestions on my issue?
2nd bonus question… Anyone ever run on a VM? I know, it’s only a Pi. I have many things going on in my house and sometimes not running on dedicated hardware has some advantages.
I believe that a couple of people have had some level of success in using a VM. However, MLAT varies between extremely iffy and nonfunctional, because the USB passthrough from physical port to virtual port apparently messes with the timing signals (which is critical to MLAT)
check /etc/default/dump1090-fa, should have the serial number entry
# SDR device type. Use “none” for a net-only configuration RECEIVER=rtlsdr # serial number or device index of device to use (only needed if there is more than one SDR connected) RECEIVER_SERIAL=“00001090”
The power issue is a limit of the USB buss. You won’t see a low voltage warning because that is for the CPU, not the USB buss. Alternatively, you can remove one of the dongle to see if the problem does not reoccur.
To be more accurate, I had a 978 SDR dongle, a 1090 SDR dongle, and a WiFi USB adapter plugged directly into USB ports on a RPi 4b and all appeared to be running well on Bullseye. Then I upgraded to Bookworm and started having problems with MLAT (as mentioned in another thread). I thought maybe the problem was too long a USB cable from the 1090 SDR dongle (5 meters, AKA 16.4 feet). So I tried a 2 meter cable and that didn’t help. Then I unplugged the 978 SDR dongle and that fixed the problem with MLAT.
Use: sudo journalctl -eu piaware | grep "Server status:"
to just look at results for MLAT that occur every 15 minutes. There should be no lines that say “clock unstable”. To verify that the SDR dongle cable length was not the problem, I switched back to the 5 meter cable and it worked fine. So the conclusion for now is that with Bookworm I can have 978 UAT or MLAT, but not both at the same time.
The solution that @kmm0000 mentioned above for running dump978-fa on another RPi, looks interesting. I didn’t know you could do that.
I am running both 1090 and 978 on one Pi4 with Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm since it was released last year. No issues at all.
1090 using FA blue dongle (builtin lna + 1090 saw filter) + light blue external filter. Antenna (indoor, mounted in window) is DIY V-Stub tuned to 1090 Mhz. Dongle connected to Pi using 1 meter USB cable.
978 using Radarbox24 red dongle (builtin 978 saw filter + lna). Antenna (indoor, mounted in window) is DIY V-Stub tuned to 978 Mhz. Dongle connected to Pi using 1 meter USB cable.
I think my system is stable because of very low rate of 978 data.
The number of UAT flights here in Toronto area is 2 to 5 per day. Even these few flights are not simultaneous, so the data flow is only from one aircraft at a time.
I probably come pretty close to the 1.2 amp USB limit when using the WiFi USB adapter. The power supply has 4 amps so should be ok.You mentioned using a powered USB hub. Do you have a recommendation for one of these? Thanks.
No recommendations for a powered USB hub. I don’t use them. There are dozens on the market with various features. I connect my RPi’s using Ethernet. With PoE there is no need for separate power brick. You’ll need an Ethernet switch with PoE or a PoE injector to use with an existing switch. I have a mid range PoE+ switch that provides 30 watts of power for each port (802.3at). Ethernet is more stable and faster than WiFi.
FYI there are 4 types - PoE 802.3af (15.4 watts), PoE+ 802,3at (30 watts) and PoE++ 802.3bt (60 watts) and 4PPoE (100 watts).
